"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light hair."
"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.
"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own heart seemed to say—"
"What?"
"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it. Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence. "The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul; and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"
As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the sunlight, before her eyes.
Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself, and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound, suggested piety. "She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul," "She is chosen to go through suffering and grief for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these words had come to her—to her—direct from the mind of the Almighty!
CHAPTER VI.
Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.